Book Basset Gives Me Enough eBook Sales to Bark About

This is a basset hound

On Monday I had a Book Basset featured author post.

This is eBook advertising that I paid for way back at the beginning of March. For just $24 I got five of my eBooks profiled on their site, which has lots of readers coming each day looking for deals.

I decided to profile the following books:

• The Jongurian Mission
  
• Black Walnut
  
• Wake Up, Detroit
  
• The Hirelings
  
• Tarot Card Killer
  

I felt that was a good mix and it gave readers a lot of price points to choose from. For instance, The Jongurian Mission is free, and if they like that they can pick up that stand-alone fantasy book, The Hirelings, for $3.99 (hardly anyone ever does).

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My Book Basset eBook Marketing Featured Author Post

Black Walnut and Wake Up, Detroit were both originally priced at $0.99 when I scheduled the ad. I’ve since raised them both up to $2.99 (they’re not selling anyways), but Amazon caught the lower price at some retailers for Wake Up, Detroit, so that one was still $0.99.

The eBook Advertising Results

So how’d things turn out? A helluva lot better than the two eBook blog tours I’ve done recently (those both resulted in zero sales).

I managed to sell 4 copies of Wake Up, Detroit and 2 copies of Black Walnut. That shot the books’ rankings up to #45,598 and #63,465 respectively.

Wake Up, Detroit's Results

Black Walnut's Results

That’s really good, especially for so few sales. You have to figure that both books were well over the million mark, probably ranking around #1,250,000 or so before those sales came through. And that means that both of them got back into their Top 100 charts for a short time.

Riding the Amazon Top 100s

Perhaps some of those sales actually came from those Top 100 appearances. I’m not sure, and I don’t think I’ll find out – both books have since fallen below #100,000 again, the typical cutoff for the Top 100s.

Anyways, I thought it was a pretty good ride, especially for two books that I think are quite enjoyable, but which no one really notices.

An added bonus was seeing Black Walnut right above Walter Mosley, a great detective writer whose Easy Rawlins books really saved me from a lot of boring days in China. (For those of you not familiar, Bill Clinton said during the ’92 race that Mosely was his favorite writer).

Maybe I’ll get a review out of these sales and those Top 100 appearances, I’m not sure.

The point is, you want to give your books a boost from time to time so you can get into those Top 100s. That provides so much more visibility.

Take my perma-free book, The Jongurian Mission. I’m always in the Top 100 for my categories, simply because the book is free and gets downloaded enough each day to stay there. It’s been in the same general spot (#3,000 to #7,000) for eight months now.

New Amazon Categories for Shorter Works

The other books I advertised with Book Basset didn’t move too much, except The Jongurian Mission. ‘Sales’ for that perma-free book have really been in the dumps recently, and I’ll profile that in an upcoming post pretty soon.

The other thing I discovered was some new Amazon categories.

Now, I first found out about these a few weeks ago while looking at the G.I. Joe books on the Kindle Worlds pages. I found them again yesterday, simply because my book happened to fall into one (I have no idea how but mean to email Amazon to get more info on this – stay posted).

Now, as you can see from the above picture, the Amazon category is called “Kindle Short Reads” and it’s further divided into units of time, like “15 Minutes” all the way up to “90 Minutes,” which would be around 50 pages or so.

The categories are divided up even further by genre, as you can see below.

All in all it’s a great way for authors with shorter works to get themselves a little more visibility. Like I said, I need to look into this further. I’m sure you’re interested, and I’ve got enough short works where it could help me.

Well, in conclusion, I didn’t sell a lot with the Book Basset ad but I sold some, got a little more visibility, and did some eBook marketing for the month. Now it’s back to writing more titles. Maybe one will have a better ride.

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